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Again.
Too many times had Zagreus faced that blistering cold atop the surface - the surface he had died over and over again to get to. Shivering winds passing through his body, rattling each and every bone in his body with an unrelenting chill. Falling snow covering his form with white to coat his soon-to-be lifeless corpse until he does it all again.
He needed to be here. Zagreus couldn't stay down there, in that stifling house with empty corridors only inhabited by the dead. The surface was liberating - cold, but free. It was everything he needed, and with the possibility that he could find his real mother meant that it was priceless. Zagreus loved Nyx, he really did, but he needed to see his birth mother.
His father is similarly relentless - piercing blades rifting through his skin. Biting. Searing fire blistered him, tearing through Zagreus' flesh - his blood the colour of Styx spilling onto the frosted grass beneath. Keeling over on his knees, his father not even granting him his full strength. He wasn't worth his father's full strength.
It was insulting.
Again.
Elysium was a lie; its ethereal plains and sparkling waters did little to hide the murky horrors that lay in wake for him. The supposed sanctuary for great heroes existed secondarily to push Zagreus back down into the depths of hell, preventing him from achieving his singular dream - escape.
Lethe flowed gently, offering a rare peace to Zagreus - even just sitting next to it, Lethe was numbing. Soothing. There had been many times where he had just…stopped, and listened to the sound of the river - melodic, like the songs Orpheus would play back at the house.
He would sit with Patroclus on occasion, when the shade would allow him, and just exist without a care in the world. A rare period of respite, where Zagreus would forget about the world. He would forget about what laid in wait for him, forget about the inevitable death that assured him that 'there was no escape.'
He wanted to prove it wrong, but he couldn't.
Not yet.
Again.
Burning heat - reminding him too much of his father - was all that surrounded him in Asphodel.
Solace didn't come easy amongst the magma and skeletons that littered the ground. Zagreus was akin to fire, and yet every step conjured pain - his fire resistance would not be his saviour. Phlegethon roared beside him, evoking beads of sweat to travel down his cheeks, dual-toned eyes growing foggier and foggier until he was blessed with the cool fountain water in one of the chambers.
It was frustrating, how the rooms shifted and changed with every escape attempt. It was frustrating because it made sense - the Underworld existed to be an eternal prison, and it would need to be designed in such a way to prevent escape. That was just how it worked, and Zagreus despised that he agreed with it.
There had been tales about Asphodel once; rolling fields of green dotted from head to toe in flowers, a sanctuary for shades who had not yet been granted Tartarus or Elysium. Nyx had woven stories of the river Phlegethon, ones that reaped destruction and corruption onto these once delicate planes and leaving nothing but a barren wasteland behind.
Zagreus wished he could've seen it.
Again.
"Why keep fighting, Zag?" Megaera had asked one day, in the midst of their routine battle.
It took him off guard, but only for a moment as he readied his shield. Blood had splattered across the walls and floor of the chamber - whether it was his, Megaera's, or some poor creatures sent to kill him on his father's request, Zagreus didn't know.
Megaera continued to remain predictable, and a part of him hoped that she was doing it on purpose as a way for him to get past but also to not shirk off her duty. That wasn't true, knowing Meg. She would keep trying to send him back, if the reappearance of her sisters was any indication.
'Why keep fighting?'
To escape. To see his mother. To live.
There was no other way; his father wasn't a pushover - far from it - and Zagreus had inherited his stubbornness from somewhere. He kept fighting because it was the only real chance he had of getting out of this place and seeing the surface. He had been trapped here for far too long - it was suffocating him.
If he had to die over and over and over again to achieve that, then so be it.
One more time.
Just…one more time.